Every session of the General Assembly since 1946 has been described as a crucial one. This perhaps proves nothing except that the United Nations since its birth has been moving precariously from crisis to crisis.
2. Today the superlatives are exhausted. They have all but lost meaning and the capacity to impress. Far more impressive than any qualifying adjective is the evidence we have heard from this rostrum of a dangerous freezing of attitudes towards peace. Infinitely more eloquent than any speeches are the atomic explosions echoing from the Siberian waste lands and from the deserts of Nevada.
3. The one salient feature of this debate has been the curious fact that everybody is for peace. The task of this Assembly would doubtless be easier if there were two clear-cut sides to this debate, one favouring peace and the other favouring war. But everybody is decidedly against sin. Yet it is this unanimous yearning for peace that must give us comfort in these parlous days. Without giving everybody equal credit for speaking sincerely, there is a certain consolation to be derived from the fact that nobody has so far come forward to proclaim the necessity and inevitability of war. We have, at least, been spared the brazen glorification of war by the dictators who are now happily dead and gone.
4. There was a time when war could be a seminal factor of progress, and when it was a fairly good gamble promising dividends to the victor. But there is no longer any percentage in a future atomic war. It has therefore been suggested that, since men cannot be expected to abjure war of their own free will, they may now, in this atomic age, be persuaded to do so by the compulsion of fear. Unfortunately, some of the speeches we have heard here have given us no cause to think so.
5. Yet the instinct of survival must remain strong even in the human species which seems to be hell-bent for suicide. It is not, I am sure, the unseemly derision with which some have greeted here a serious proposal for peace that bespeaks the deepest instincts of the human race, but rather the simple wisdom of the humble people of all lands who value the great boon of life above all things. This, in the end, must decide the great issue of war or peace, not the grim ironic humour which delights in ridicule and seems determined to win a debating point even at the cost of universal catastrophe.
6. Three of the great Powers, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, have formally submitted a proposal [A/1943] for proceeding with the regulation, limitation and balanced reduction of all armed forces and all armaments, including atomic weapons. It is an essential condition of this programme that there be a system of disclosure and verification of all armaments, in successive stages; and concurrently, an effective system of international inspection to verify the adequacy and accuracy of this information.
7. The distinguished representative of the Soviet Union has poured unmitigated scorn on this proposal. He has impatiently brushed aside a proposal that, to every honest mind, is fertile with possibilities for calm and orderly consideration. But his sarcasm cannot conceal the fact that this new tripartite proposal represents a substantial advance from a position previously held by the United States of America. For the first time we have the possibility of an actual census of atomic weapons, along with other weapons, organically linked to the objective of regulating and limiting armed forces and armaments of all kinds, including the control of atomic energy and the prohibition of atomic weapons. Mr. Vyshinsky admits that a method of inventory is appropriate for counting candles, boots and other household goods, thereby implying that it is wholly unsuitable for the ultimate purpose of regulating armaments, controlling atomic energy, and prohibiting atomic weapons. Strangely enough, Mr. Vyshinsky himself provided the best refutation of his own argument, for in the same breath he then proceeded to read out impressive statistics about industrial progress in the Soviet Union. Yet it is certainly not more important for our peace of mind to know how many kilowatt-hours the Soviet Union now produces as compared with other States, than to know how many atomic bombs and jet planes each of them has and must forgo for the sake of peace. It would appear that Mr. Vyhinsky has no real objection to counting things, except the things that really count.
8. Since all the Powers must simultaneously agree to a common system of inventory, verification and inspection, it is difficult to understand why one Power alone should object to such a proposal. The dangers of disclosure, if there be any, will be suffered equally by all of them. Indeed, the situation will be that the one Power which now objects to the system will receive, in exchange for the information regarding its armed forces and armaments, analogous and comparable information regarding three Powers which it regards as its potential enemies. It is difficult to imagine a more advantageous deal than this. Therefore, unless and until a foolproof system of verification and inspection is first established and in actual operation, the United States of America cannot be expected to reveal, and we should, in fact, ask it not to reveal, any information which might endanger the security of the world.
9. Underlying this whole controversy, of course, is the absence of good faith. One regrets to have to say that the USSR proposals exhibit this vice to an extreme degree. We recall, all of us who have attended the previous sessions of the General Assembly, the original proposal of the Soviet Union for a reduction of all armed forces by one-third, at a time when the whole world knew that all the great Powers, excepting the Soviet Union alone, had disbanded their troops. We also recall the well-known USSR proposal for the prohibition of atomic weapons, at a time when it was well known that the United States enjoyed a clear superiority in the production of such weapons which served as a counterpoise to the superiority of the Soviet Union in armed forces.
10. These proposals formed part of the so-called USSR “peace, offensive”, a very appropriate term to describe a. calculated attempt to win the battle of propaganda with proposals on disarmament which obviously could never be accepted by the other side. All such so-called “peace offensives” must therefore be regarded with suspicion. For they proceed from motives which have little or nothing to do with the objective of genuine peace. They are bound to create counter-offensives in kind, and thus reduce the search for peace to a dishonest and even absurd competition for the applause of the gullible.
11. A certain competitive spirit can be useful in the quest for peace. But the object of the competition ought not to be tire winning of an argument but rather the diminution of argument through mutual accommodation and conciliation. What the peace-loving peoples of the world would like to see — yes, even the millions who are said to have signed the so-called Stockholm Peace Appeal — is not any of the great Powers invidiously claiming that it alone is right and all the others wrong, but all of them working out together a sane and practical programme for the maintenance of peace. The peoples of the world are less interested in finding out whose claim to peaceful intentions is more eloquently advanced, than in knowing whether the great Powers are, in fact, ready to translate their repeated peaceful affirmations into deeds.
12. It is our humble submission that, in order to achieve this end, there ought to be a moratorium on argument merely for the sake of winning a debating point, as well as a moratorium on recrimination, with all the use of invectives, merely for the sake of heaping blame on each other. What the world would like to see, I repeat, is an honest and! sincere effort to get down to brass tacks: for the representatives of tire great Powers to get together and apply I themselves to the workmanlike task of securing all mankind from the unimaginable horrors of an atomic war. I have described this task as workmanlike, as a job akin to masonry and carpentry, in order to show that it cannot possibly be achieved by methods of incantation or legerdemain, nor yet by clever short cuts no matter how attractive these may seem. It is a process of laying stone on stone and fitting the joints together carefully, one step after another, taking care to smooth out the roughnesses, completing one stage before beginning the next.
13. The USSR disarmament proposal [A/1944] hardly conforms to this conception of our quest for peace. It depends almost entirely on the assumed magical properties of a prior and simple agreement to prohibit the manufacture and the use of atomic weapons. It glosses over the more laborious details of military inventory, verification, and inspection by an international or supra-national authority which are essential prerequisites for the regulation and limitation of armaments. It ignores the possibility that while all the great Powers may readily adhere to an agreement not to use atomic weapons, such an agreement would not in itself create the basic good faith which alone can give peace of mind and security to the world. It ignores the further possibility that even if the great Powers were to agree in good faith not to use atomic weapons for aggressive war, none of them would be likely to forgo its use for purposes of self-defence and retaliation unless there were absolute assurance against the clandestine production and stockpiling of atomic weapons. None of them, in short, will ever surrender its capacity for defence unless all the others surrender equally and simultaneously their power to attack.
14. It is precisely at this point where the proposal of the Soviet Union is weak, that the new tripartite proposal exhibits many features of strength. The tripartite proposal advances a flexible plan that can be studied, blueprinted, modified and worked out, stage by stage, in step with the growth of mutual understanding and confidence among the nations. Within its framework, the door remains open to the mutual accommodation of views and the conciliation of varying interests. In contrast, the proposal of the Soviet Union is based on fixed and inflexible premises. It starts from an assumption of mutual good faith and confidence which do not exist, and builds the whole structure of peace on the hope that all the Powers, including the Soviet Union, will keep their pledged word without verification or check up. This is to build on quicksand. A sense of realism compels us to suggest that the method of working gradually towards mutual confidence is to be preferred for the purpose of erecting a sound and durable structure of world peace.
15. This method is bound to be tedious and difficult, but the Soviet Union, which has accomplished prodigies of achievement in war and peace, ought not to be deterred by the prospect of laborious effort. This is a challenge to the Soviet Union, not to abandon its legitimate interests, but to co-operate in working out a common programme of peace that will be for the enduring benefit of all the world’s peoples. For here is merely a set of suggestions in the elaboration and execution of which the Soviet Union will have the opportunity to express its views and make its own suggestions in a manner befitting its place and power in the world. But the first essential is a willingness to be reasonable and a desire for conciliation. This means that the one great danger that must be avoided at this stage is the freezing of attitudes towards peace.
16. In the meantime, and while the rest of the world waits for one clear sign of such willingness and desire on the part of the Soviet Union — and none has come so far from this rostrum — we are compelled to pursue the only alternative that remains in order to maintain international peace and security. This alternative is being pursued in two ways: through the development on paper as well as in the field of a United Nations collective security system, and through the establishment of mutual defence arrangements in various regions of the world.
17. Seventeen months ago the United Nations decided to repel communist aggression in Korea in the first collective military action ever undertaken by an international organization. Totally improvised and developed from scratch, the United Nations effort in Korea has today become a magnificent field demonstration of the potentialities of a system of collective security. Full credit must be given by all impartial men to the United States which has borne the brunt of the struggle. For our part, we in the Philippines are proud to have contributed our modest share to this historic undertaking. For what has sustained our men and the men of fifteen other nations in Korea has been the determination that aggression, shall not go unrepelled and that potential aggressors shall draw the appropriate lesson from the action of the United Nations.
18. As a result of the communist aggression in Korea, the General Assembly decided at the last session [resolution 377 (V)] to proceed with the study and elaboration of measures, political, economic and military, which the United Nations may take in case of future threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression. The Collective Measures Committee has now presented its report to the General Assembly. That report is, in effect, a monumental project on collective security, the first of its kind in the history of international organization. It is our hope that it will be considered with the care and imagination it fully deserves.
19. At the same time, progress has been made in the establishment and strengthening of mutual defence arrangements in accordance with principles sanctioned by the Charter. The purely defensive character of all these arrangements, including the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and the North Atlantic Treaty is patent, and nobody can read into them any aggressive designs whatever, unless it be those who see reflected in them, as in a mirror, their own hidden purpose of aggression. In particular, the series of new mutual defence treaties in the Pacific area and the project of a Pacific security pact, which owes its origin to the vision of the President of the Philippines, have been directly inspired by the fear of communist aggression, The measure of this fear is the fact that the Filipino people have had to swallow the bitter pill of an unsatisfactory peace treaty with Japan in order to permit the integration of Japan into a system of mutual defence against communism in the western Pacific.
20. As the whole world knows, the leadership assumed by the United States in effecting these arrangements has been virtually forced upon it by circumstances and accepted by it with considerable reluctance. Mr. Vyshinsky himself, on this rostrum, has pointed out the terrific burden which the American people are shouldering by reason of the vast commitments assumed by the United States to support the economy and strengthen the defences of friendly nations. No one should imagine that they enjoy the sacrifices which these commitments will entail for a long time to come. It has been claimed on behalf of the Soviet Union that its resources are being used to raise the living standards of the Soviet peoples. Yet the vast uninterrupted armaments programme of the Soviet Union must inevitably slow down the elevation of the people’s livelihood. Flow can anyone conceive that the American people, who have long been accustomed to the highest living standards in the world, would readily accept a diminution of those standards by reason of the rearmament programme unless they understand it to be absolutely necessary? The sacrifice is obviously unequal, for what the Soviet people have never had they will not miss, while the American people will miss what they have always had. Here again, the American people have no choice. They must give of their substance to other peoples in order that the latter may be saved from the misery, chaos and anarchy on which communism feeds. They must rebuild their abandoned defences and help other countries build up their own in order to redress the dangerous imbalance of power which, since the end of the war, has so greatly favoured the Soviet Union.
21. It is a favourite argument of the pacifists that an armaments race must inevitably lead to war. But the argument is really valid only in reverse. We can have assurance of enduring peace only if all the Powers agree simultaneously to give up their power to attack. In the present state of power politics, the surest way to provoke war is to maintain a condition of imbalance in military power, in short, a condition of unilateral disarmament which places one side at the mercy of the other.
22. The peace resulting from the establishment of these regional mutual defence arrangements and the consequent maintenance of a certain balance in military power will be at best a precarious peace. It is not the peace we want; it is not the peace we must continue to seek. It is an expedient that harks back to the makeshift remedies of classical diplomacy in the past and, hence, is inadequate to the needs of our present world. Our world in this atomic age requires guarantees of peace far more solid than those afforded by the conventional system of balance of power.
23. When Mr. Vyshinsky denounces these treaties of mutual defence, he should at least remember that they could almost immediately be rendered unnecessary at a single stroke by the Soviet Union itself. Here, indeed, is where a single peaceful act on the part of Moscow would work like magic in dissipating the fears and suspicions that have settled on men’s minds like an incubus. Let the Kremlin but give such proof to the world, and this awful weight would be lifted from the nations and this mad race towards disaster halted at once. We have heard Mr. Vyshinsky several times in a few days from this rostrum. It is very sad to admit that no sign has so far come from him, that the word that heals has not been spoken. All that we have seen so far is a white dove of peace with which he was photographed just before the meeting this afternoon. All men who love peace must continue to hope that the dove will be more than a conventional symbol, and that men will not turn away from this session off the General Assembly in bitter despair and with a gnawing emptiness in their hearts.
24. In 1948, during the third session of the General assembly in Paris, the Mexican delegation, under the distinguished leadership of our President, presented a resolution which, in our records, now bears the name of his illustrious country. That resolution [190 (III)], which called upon the great Powers to settle their differences by peaceful means in accordance with the Charter, was unanimously approved by the General Assembly.
25. In 1949, during the laying of the cornerstone of the United Nations in New York over which it was my privilege to preside [237th meeting], I was so deeply impressed by the historic import of the Mexican peace resolution that I expressed the wish that it ought to have been included among the documents which were placed in the cornerstone along with the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
26. Today we have the opportunity, under the guidance and leadership of our President, here in the United Nations, to work out the grave problems of our time in the spirit of the Mexican peace resolution which he himself sponsored in 1948. This is a significant coincidence which, I sincerely hope, augurs well for the effective use of the United Nations as a centre for harmonizing the views and actions of Member States, and for composing their differences within the framework of the Charter.